Dennis Haarsager's rolling environmental scan for electronic media. "Somebody has to do something, and it's just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us." --Jerry Garcia "Wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then." --Bob Seger

The cutting-room floor is going away. ¶ As content proliferates on multiple platforms-from the mother ship of linear television to the emerging media offspring of broadband, video-on-demand and wireless-content providers are mining their cutting-room-floor footage and recycling, repurposing and reusing material across the new screens. ¶ As a result, many networks are in the embryonic stages of determining how to rejigger their production and shooting schedules, and more important, whether such changes can yet be monetized. ¶ The key is to shoot smarter, said Channing Dawson, ... "We are starting down the road of how to model financially, how to handle the shooting and the logistics. How do you piggyback production so you can produce five three-minute pieces for broadband or VOD in an additional three hours? Do you set up as a separate shoot or a piggyback shoot?" he asked. ... TV Week link (free sub. req.)

Monday, 30 August 2004

... The forecast demonstrates that global broadband household penetration, 3.4% in 2002, will rise to an impressive 16% by 2008. The survey summary notes the great variability of what is deemed "broadband" across the globe--the average customer in Europe getting 512 Kbps, while in Japan or Korea, 6 Mbps is not unusual. In the United States, where most customers are accessing broadband via cable modem, 1.5 Mbps is the typical speed. ... TMCnet.com link

The promise of Internet-based video has long been hamstrung by copyright and piracy worries, slow dial-up connections, technical challenges and consumer disdain for watching blotchy videos on their home computers. But a Silicon Valley startup is tackling those obstacles, hoping to become the first major provider of cinema straight from the Internet to the living room boob tube. ...¶... With new video and copy-protection technologies, and the rapid expansion of high-speed broadband connections, the time may be ripe. Akimbo hopes to tap the vast vault of programming floating on the Internet, repackage it in DVD-quality, and bring it to a set-top box so viewers can easily choose what they want to watch from their sofa - not from their desktop. ... My Way News link

Saturday, 28 August 2004

... But these growing sales don't necessarily mean that everybody has a clear idea of what they're buying. In the pre-HDTV days, TV shopping was a simple business: All you had to do was take the width of your TV stand and cross-reference it against the thickness of your wallet. But the advent of new technologies has made things a little confusing. Plasma? LCD? DLP? These are some of the terms you might not have been faced with if you haven't gone shopping in more than a few years. ... washingtonpost.com link

When people talk about the high cost of digital television, they often forget that it can also be the cheapest kind to use month after month. While many people opt to get digital broadcasts as they do analog by paying for cable or satellite service, you could instead use a digital receiver and an over-the-air antenna to pull in a clear, sharp high-definition picture from local stations for free. ¶ This was always part of the digital-TV promise, but many earlier receivers had serious trouble tuning in off-air signals reliably. Lately, though, as manufacturers and broadcasters have fine-tuned their equipment, off-air reception has become surprisingly possible -- as we found out in testing digital reception at a handful of locations across the Washington area. ... washingtonpost.com

If my car died tomorrow, I'd have a lot less angst picking its successor than I would if my TV conked out. The "digital transition," as it's called, has given the television market some of the same frustrating inscrutability as the computing market, with an extra dose of technological, regulatory and economic uncertainty. ¶ And yet: People are buying these things. Not just the techno-victims who will snap up any unproven gadget with a four-figure price tag, but regular folks who simply want a better set when their old one implodes. ¶ Finding that better set without buying more or less than you actually want is the real trick of the digital-TV market. Here are six riddles to keep in mind: ... washingtonpost.com link

Falling costs, new technology and competition, with a nudge from regulatory changes, are bringing fiber closer to homes in the U.S. just a few years after the idea seemed all but written off. ¶ Verizon Communications Inc., the country's largest regional carrier, is scheduled to launch commercial fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) service by the end of the third quarter to about 100,000 potential customers in the Dallas area. The other two major incumbent carriers, SBC Communications Inc. and BellSouth Corp., are pursuing their own strategies to get fiber into homes or neighborhoods and deliver a multi-megabit bandwidth boost to DSL (digital subscriber line). ... The Industry Standard link